


Boy

by MissEllaVation



Category: U2
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-06
Updated: 2017-04-06
Packaged: 2018-10-15 07:02:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10552056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissEllaVation/pseuds/MissEllaVation
Summary: Bono has to do some homework and he is very creative; a significant encounter occurs.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I guess I have a particular Bono-and-Edge timeline in my head, which is nice because I feel like I can just drop in at any point along the line and write something. For this fic, if it can even be called a fic, it’s roughly 1976. This is a little weird, very interior, and from Bono’s point of view, which is—I don’t even know. But I spend a lot of time with high school kids these days, and I have a couple of dude-students who like to try to shock me with their writing (ha.) But maybe that’s why this came to me the way it did.
> 
> I know U2 got started when Larry put the notice on the notice board and everyone crowded into his kitchen, but I don’t think I’m wrong in thinking that the key players already knew each other at least in passing(?). So I’m going with that. Anyway, it’s April, which is National Poetry Month in the U.S., so I’m using poetic license.
> 
> This is clean because they are babies. But the image of a roomful of teenagers parting like the Red Sea between B and E came to me fully formed, so I thought I should go with it. Sorry about the lack of sex. This will get fewer hits because of that, I've realized. Next time I'll write something really filthy. :P
> 
> Regarding the cat: he might be an ancestor of a certain French cat that likeamadonna has written about. Why not.

_For homework: Write an essay about a typical day in your life. You can write about your home and your family, or a day at school, or how you might spend a summer’s day. Be creative!_

You _know_ I don’t have typical days, Mr. Gerrity. Michael. Mike. May I call you Mike? But if I ever did have one:

It would begin with rain. It would begin with rain and gray pavements and running and falling and bruised knees. It would begin with a shove out the door and the door slamming behind. It would begin with low brick walls and small plots of grass and small low hedges. Everything small and low. Nothing wants to stick out or show itself or be much above anything else. Flowers bloom in the early spring and then a hard rain comes and batters them into the ground. Doesn’t matter if it rains, you still get kicked out the door and the door still slams behind you. And it doesn’t matter, because whatever you think you left behind you in the house isn’t really there anyway. But there’s no place else to go. Nowhere much. Or maybe there’s the whole wide world, but I don’t know how to get to it yet.

In the city centre, some golden-haired boy is walking toward me with his dog. Dog’s not even on a leash but just trotting alongside, good boy, and this boy coming toward me looks like everything I was supposed to be but am not. Brushed washed and fed, cared for. Someone tells this boy they love him every day. He passes this on to the dog. The happiest dog, looking up at the boy and grinning. I don’t want to feel jealous of some boy’s dog. But it’s as if the rain doesn’t even touch them. What if it’s only raining over me? This is not an original thought. I’ve seen it in cartoons. The sad man with the raincloud just pissing down on him while everyone else walks in the sunshine. I don’t really see myself like that. The man in the cartoon is old, generally, wearing a sad looking raincoat and carrying a briefcase. Someone’s sad Da. I may not have much else, but I’m not that person yet. 

At the weekends I like to see films, but most of them are crap. I liked Taxi Driver but I also liked Rocky. I like to read poems. I like The Song of Wandering Aengus; the old man with the fire in his head, searching all his life for the silver fish-girl who disappeared. Again I’m not old, but I cry my eyes out at that poem because I think I know how the old man feels. (Although I think I might have found the girl. Or someone almost her.) I like having a meal at a friend’s house even if his parents yell the whole time. There’s something nice about hearing a mother yell. They don’t yell at _me_ , but it would be all right if they did. 

I like the way black looks when it’s next to red. For example: a stoplight reflecting in a wet street. That’s one good thing about rain; it turns streets into mirrors. It changes the nature of the street. It can’t be all bad then. I like ice cream. I like Mars Bars. I like girls with David Bowie haircuts. But once the rain flattens them out they just look like ordinary girls again. Of course, ordinary girls are fine too. Girls are good in general. 

Summer is all right. The sea. The seafront. That’s something to think about. I think I could live in all sorts of places, but I think that if a place is very far from the sea I would feel out of sorts there. I think the sea is a means of escape. Maybe it’s in my bones. Nobody ever came to this place without crossing the sea. What drove them here to this sopping wet island where everyone is angry and everywhere you turn you run into a fist or a boot or a bomb? I don’t mean to keep saying things like this; this is not my typical day. I’m trying to figure it all out. I like to walk along the water. Hungry the very second I get there, the smell of chips and all the soggy wrappers blowing around. 

Sounds. Obviously sounds. Wind rushing through. I hear voices in it. I know there’s someone out there trying to tell me something. Maybe I’m not right. It’s only seagulls. Weather-lights and cloud patterns. I’ve walked too far. I’m in the fog. I’m far away from the fat ladies and the pretty girls and the children who run in the sand like little birds and I’m far away even from the smell of chips and the ice cream bells and I think I might have actually walked to the end of the world. 

Turn around, I tell myself. Just turn back and walk the way you came; it’s all still there. Everything can’t be impermanent. Something has to be real, and it has to stay around and not leave me. Just turn back. 

I know I’m not doing this assignment the right way. I’m sorry. But I’m being “creative.” You can’t say I’m not. 

One thing I really want to write about here is music, but it’s the hardest thing to write about. Everyone listens to music and thinks music is important and talks about it night and day, and then when they try to write about it, it just falls flat. It’s like trying to write about God or sex. Am I allowed to say that? Am I going to get thrown out of school? Because that really is what it’s like. How can you take something so enormous and slice it up into little words? Because listening to music is like being visited by The Truth. I don’t mean that the musicians are any closer to the truth than the rest of us are (or is that exactly what I mean?) But I think that through the act of playing music they bring the truth to them. So when I sit in my room and listen to T-Rex what I’m really hearing is some sound from somewhere else that, while I’m inside the shape of that four-minute song, makes everything better, brighter, clearer, finer than what I can usually sense around me.

I mean that for those four minutes, the green rug, the wallpaper, the bed, the light, the doorknob are revealed as the very essence of greenness, wallpaper-ness, bed-ness, lightness. And the doorknob is less door, more knob.

I have lost my train of thought, Mr. Gerrity! But I am being creative, and you can’t say I’m not!

*

I have a new friend. You might know him so I won’t say his name. I don’t know, maybe I just won’t hand in this part of the essay. You can have the part that ends with “knob.” I think it has more than enough words to fulfill the assignment, and it is very, very creative.

So I have a friend. And it was weird because I knew he was here, I mean, I’d seen him around. I think I’d even talked to him. This isn’t a very big school, is it. But I met him, officially, at a party, someone else’s house, I mean not mine (I would never have a party here) or his. Some girl’s house, I think it was, a really nice house, some girl who lives in Malahide with indulgent parents who stayed upstairs and didn’t react to any sounds, no matter how strange. Some girl with an older brother who sometimes walked through to sneer at us and eat our crisps. This girl also had an orange cat who kept jumping into various laps, which was nice. Good cat.

This friend was the girl’s neighbor. And even though he was washed and brushed and fed like the boy with the dog in city centre, he wasn’t like that boy at all. No smug or sneer to him at all. Actually the orange cat seemed to like him best. ‘Cos he didn’t tease the cat or annoy the cat or try to get the cat drunk. He was sort of protecting the cat. He was sitting in the middle of an overcrowded sofa, streetlight shining through the window right behind his head, barely any room for him at all, and everyone around him just screeching and spazzing and generally carrying on like eejits.

And he was just sitting there protecting this cat, holding this cat between his hands, giving it the occasional _scritch_ , and the cat really should have been panicking and trying to escape all the noise and the bollocks going on around it, but it wasn’t, it was just sitting there on this boy’s skinny legs with its eyes half-closed. Purring most likely. And I don’t mean to say the boy was boring or anything like that, because it wasn’t the case. It was the opposite, I think.

I was standing at the other end of the room feeling the way I usually do in party situations. Like if I don’t tell all the jokes and flirt with all the girls and eat all the food and sustain some kind of bodily harm it won’t have been a proper party. So I’m doing these things as if compelled by mysterious forces, and I’m surrounded by chaos, and he’s surrounded by chaos too.

But as sure as I’m lying on my bedroom floor, on the green rug, writing this essay, Mr. Gerrity, and being creative as feck, the crowd opened up, I mean it parted, straight across the carpet in a line, like the Red Sea, all the way from where I’m standing with a punch bowl on my head, to where he’s sitting in the middle of this couch with this cat, and he’s wearing this bemused little smile like “would you even believe this shite.” As if we’re in a conspiracy together, like we’re on “Get Smart” and I work for KAOS and he works for CONTROL, only one of us is a double-agent and we’re actually on the same team. 

His face was a bit pretty like a girl’s under a mop of coarse black hair. I know what you’re thinking Mr. Gerrity, yeh great poof, but don’t think that. Or think whatever you want. I don’t care. I just knew he was important. Like someone put their hand on my shoulder and turned me toward him. “That’s someone you should talk to.”

So I took the punch bowl off my head and the oranges out of my shirt, and started walking along that path of empty carpet. And I’m not usually shy, but suddenly I was. Maybe it was because I didn’t have the punch bowl or the oranges anymore. I usually have those things, even if they’re invisible. I don’t know how else to explain it. I’ve always got a lampshade on my head, figuratively. I’m trying here, Mr. Gerrity, all right?

I felt really shy. This felt important. I think I said, “howya.” And he said, “howya.” And I said, “all right,” and “seen you at school,” and he said, “yeah.” 

And I was actually sweating, I could feel it on my neck and down the back of my shirt, but this lad might as well have been sitting in an Alpine meadow with a cool wind blowing through his hair. He blinked at me with his eyes that were sort of slanted and green. So did the cat.

“I saw you,” I said, “walking out of Murray’s with ‘The Who by Numbers.’”

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Thursday afternoon.”

“Any good?” I asked.

He twisted his mouth a little and said, “Half-good. Actually, ‘Slip Kid’ is the only really good one on it.”

And I said, “Oh yeah. Well, they’re getting old now.” (The Who, I meant. It’s a band, Mr. Gerrity. They’re like thirty-five or so. Oh wait, I’m not giving you this part, am I.) “The cover is hideous, don’t you think?”

“Yeah. But everyone's doing ugly covers now, and boring too. It’s like they all forgot why they got started, somehow.”

How did he _know_ , Mr. Gerrity? I mean, this was such an important thing to say. It was exactly right. He could have said he thought the cover was funny or clever or something, which is probably what most people would have said, but which is clearly, obviously, wrong. The album cover for 'The Who By Numbers' is the worst album cover ever conceived, but most people don’t realize that.

I nodded at the cat. “Who’s your friend?”

“Pickles,” he said. “Apparently.”

And that, Mr. Gerrity, is when I burst into uncontrollable laughter. I didn’t mean to. I never do things like that. It was something to do with the weird shyness, and the sweat. It was being without my punchbowl or my lampshade or my oranges. I was defenseless. I’m not even like that with my new girlfriend. I’m not even like that with anyone.

And this boy just grinned at me. He didn’t say, “It’s just the cat’s name, mate.” He didn’t stare or shake his head or pretend not to know me. He just grinned at me with his slanty green eyes crinkling up and his perfect little nose and his teeth a bit like a rabbit’s. Then he set the cat down on the floor, gently, and said, “Mind yourself, Pickles.” And he stood up and stuck his hand out and said he was called Dave.

I managed to stop laughing and say, “Paul.”

“I know. Everyone knows you.”

This made me happy and unhappy at the same time.

“Hot in here, isn’t it?” he said. Dave. Dave said.

“Yeah. Body heat.” I don’t know why I said that. Well, I suppose it’s the sort of thing I would say, but I wouldn’t normally spend the next ninety seconds wondering about why I’d said it, and wondering if it were a weird thing to say, as if it might have implications and shades of meaning beyond the mere fact that many bodies packed into a medium-sized front room in Malahide would necessarily raise the temperature of that room several degrees.

*

Outside, the rain had become a fine mist, which is the best thing the rain can possibly do, short of fucking off altogether. We were really close to the sea and we could smell it. 

“Must be nice living here,” I said.

Dave shrugged. “It’s all right.”

“I saw you,” I blurted (why did I keep blurting things?) “carrying a guitar in the hallway at school.”

He grinned. “Yeah. I play. Do you…?”

“Oh yeah! Well, a little. I’m not that good but—”

“Who do you like?”

I knew what he meant. He wasn’t talking about girls or anything like that. I rattled them off. “David Bowie T-Rex Roxy Music Patti Smith (you know her?) Ramones Velvet Underground.” I left out: Beatles Stones Led Zep. It went without saying that you liked Beatles Stones Led Zep, but frankly they were beginning to feel like your grandparents’ old 78’s, a little bit brown and dusty.

Dave knew this. He was smiling down at the wet pavement, grinding the toe of his scuffed-up Earth shoe into it. “We should jam.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “Definitely.”

(Well, it never quite happened, Mr. Gerrity, but now we raise our eyebrows when we see each other in the hallways at school. It’s significant. A signal. A high-sign. It’s going to happen one day, soon. The jamming, I mean. Yeh great poof.)

We went back into the house and someone threw an uncommonly large banana at me, yelling, “see what you can do with this, Hewson!”

The end. 

Mr. Gerrity, it has been a pleasure.


End file.
